Bone shrugged. “Got to figure they’re putting up new repeaters, but we don’t got one yet, and Auberon has money. So…”
So they should have been a priority. Maybe they were, and other cells in the underground were breaking them. The bottle network was slow compared to the light-speed transmission they had all become accustomed to, but it was also hard to stop. Repeaters at the gates were static or nearly static targets. Easy to identify and easy to destroy. The thing that had made them safe and stable all these years had been the eyes of Medina in the slow zone, the certainty that any action against them would be identified and traced back. With no eyes left in the slow zone, impossible things were suddenly practical.
“Our local network?” Naomi said. “It’s unbreakable?”
“Everything’s breakable,” Bone said. “But we’ll make them work for it, and it fails in sections, so we can shut it down before everyone’s compromised.”
It was the right answer. If he’d said they were safe, she’d have trusted him less. “Bien alles,” she said, and rose. Bone followed her lead, holding his hand out to shake hers with a nervousness that looked like hero worship. She took his hand. Whatever the future brought, Bone could go through it remembering that he’d shaken hands with Naomi Nagata. She didn’t like this sense of wearing a mask that everyone else had put on her, but it was the price she paid to do what needed doing.
“I’ll be in touch,” she said, and they walked away, taking different paths out of the common space.
The corridors and passages of the base were wide and had low ceilings for someone her height. White tile glittered the same on the walls as the floor. Thirty people could have walked abreast. She put her hands in her pockets, kept her eyes down, inviting everyone she passed to overlook her. Walking helped her think.
Her problem—and her enemy’s—was the scale of it all. Millennia of human history had played out on the surface of a single planet. Mere centuries in the wide void between worlds. And all of that had happened before her own birth. The universe she’d known had always had stations around Saturn and Jupiter, rock hoppers eking out livelihoods in the Belt. Almost every gate led to another system that wide and complex, but without humanity. Without history. Without the infrastructure of everything humans took for granted and relied on.
It had seemed smaller
when there was a hub to the wheel. Now, anyone could transit anywhere, and there was no one to coordinate or record it. The more she thought about it, the more untenable the idea of rebuilding inside the slow zone seemed. Medina and the Typhoon and the fleet of Transport Union ships that had been caught there were proof that the nature of the space itself there wasn’t benign. Putting a crewed base there was risking the death of everyone involved. An automated one was a statement of faith in their computer security that history didn’t justify. Holding and protecting over thirteen hundred gates from their starward faces was an entirely different prospect from holding one strong position in the center. It would take the largest fleet humanity had ever built just to watch the gates, and that didn’t take policing the vastness of their solar systems into account.
Duarte had come in with the strategy of permitting local governments autonomy so long as they followed his rules. It had seemed like a kind of magnanimity at the time. It looked more like necessity now.
And deeper even than that, the eerie words two gates lost.
There had to have been a moment when they could have refused. When she and Jim and maybe a handful of other people could have looked at the ring gates and the vastness beyond them, seen the danger, and tiptoed away. All the signs had been there. A civilization had built all this vast and unimaginable power and still been scattered like knucklebones. What had made them think it was safe for them? That it was worth the risk?
She took the tube to Chava’s block as if she belonged there. The crowd on the platform was a mix. Bright-eyed, tea-drinking third-shifters on their way to work. Weary second shift just coming home or heading out to dinner. A handful of youths in outlandish fashion burning the first-shift midnight oil. Naomi stayed quiet and apart, and she appreciated the beauty of it all. And the innocence. A hundred people, more or less, waiting for a tube car on a moon above a planet that circled a sun that hadn’t born them, and jockeying to be the first ones through the door so that they could get a good seat. Maybe the most human thing possible.
A young man in a brown collarless shirt scowled at her for staring, as if maybe she was mocking him. She nodded her apology and looked away.
Her life as Chava’s guest was pleasant. Waking in a real bed, showering with water that didn’t recycle twice while she was under it, eating food that had more than one taste. The long months Naomi had spent in her container felt more and more like a spiritual pilgrimage, a journey she had gone through and emerged from changed. It hadn’t seemed like that at the time.
Their schedules had drifted, and she was awake long after Chava had gone to bed. Naomi stayed quiet while she worked, but she worked. The underground in Auberon was well developed, but until she decided it was time to throw the governor and his political officers into a hole, her options were limited. Entrench. Develop more holes in their security. Compromise the enemy further. But there was nothing of Laconia’s grand strategy to be learned. They were as cut off as she was.
And then, only days after her own messages had slipped out through the rings, the bottles began to return. They came in one at a time, a trickle of data that snuck into the system. Reports, requests, and messages encrypted with the most recent ciphers. Bara Gaon was on lockdown, but the exploration sites were still autonomous. New Albion had taken the opportunity to sabotage the Laconian transfer station and were now being hunted by the local security forces. Transport Union ships had started making emergency transits to systems like Tabalta and Hope where local populations were in danger of collapse. It was like slowly beginning to recover her eyesight after being nearly blind.
The message from Sol system originated on Callisto, the data passed covertly to a datafarm on Ceres and repackaged into a bottle on a Transport Union ship near the Sol gate. It was routed to her.
On the screen, Bobbie looked tired and grim. A grayness had come into her features, and the thick muscles of her neck had begun to look wiry. A decryption artifact locked a corner of the image like part of her shoulder was frozen in time while the rest of her was free to move.
“Hey there,” Bobbie said into the camera, and a loneliness Naomi hadn’t known she felt swamped her for a moment. She felt the memory of that last hug before she’d left Sol, and it was more alive and real to her than the last time she’d seen Jim. “I have something. An opportunity, I think. Alex wants me to run it past you.”
Naomi listened as Bobbie laid out the situation. The Storm trapped in Sol, first by the catastrophe in the slow zone, and now by the Tempest’s presence. The antimatter.
She felt herself sliding into the same analytic mind-set that had been her whole life in the container. She’d hardly been out—a few weeks on the Bhikaji Cama and now here with Chava—and slipping back already felt cold and constraining. Her mind ticked through the implications of Bobbie’s plan: the exposure of the Storm, the scrutiny that would fall on the Jovian moon bases, the symbolic and practical effects of Duarte’s losing a second Magnetar-class ship.
And as she did, a quiet part of her mourned.
The day she’d gone into the container and committed herself to living as a pea in a shell game had been the day she left the Rocinante behind. It felt like relief at the time. Like her soul had been rubbed raw, and the container was her bandage. Her whole life, she’d survived the unsurvivable by falling back and getting small. And every time, she had come back healed. Scarred, sometimes. But healed.
All it had taken was a handful of human interactions to show her that the Naomi who had fled into the container wasn’t the one who’d come out. Time had passed, and she had found what peace she was going to find.
When she’d taken up Saba’s role, it had been from necessity, but it had also been because she was ready to. It was only after the fact that she was starting to see what leaders were. The price the position required.
The water started hissing, and a door opened and closed from back in Chava’s bedroom. She was awake and taking a morning shower. It would be time for Naomi to go to bed soon. It was also safe to respond to Bobbie without being an impolite guest. Funny how that still seemed to matter.
She set her hand terminal up with the camera pointing to her, then used the security filter to strip out the background. If the signal was intercepted, there wouldn’t be artifacts leading back to Chava. It left Naomi looking like she was floating in a featureless void. She started the recording.
“Hey, Bobbie. Your plan… looks solid. I know that’s not the argument I was making the last time we spoke, but the situation’s changed. Several situations have. I still maintain that working through political means to a peaceful endgame is critical. But if there is a chance to do that without a Magnetar-class ship keeping its boot on Sol system’s throat, it’ll be easier. If it was just a ship, I think I might still have some reservations, but you’re right. Duarte made the Tempest a symbol. We don’t often get the chance to kill the enemy’s story about itself.